Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  He did solve security problems by transporting peoples – some of the Nogai Hordes were resettled in the Urals, Taman and north Crimea, and then moved again. Their sin was being unreliable and too close to the turbulent Caucasus. These migrations must have been sad processions, for which Potemkin bears responsibility, just as contemporary British ministers, for example, bear the shame of the slave trade.

  Overall, Potemkin cared enormously and did as much as an administrator in that century could do. Later, possibly during the building of his last city Nikolaev, there is a melancholic note to Faleev about the conditions of his ordinary people: ‘You have to tell me the truth. I can’t just know but you should be ashamed to conceal the truth from me. I employed people to work, promising them to pay them salaries; but it was turned into hard labour. Unluckily, my name is everywhere, so that they could begin to think I am a tyrant…’.9

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  The Prince planned to turn the Crimea and the south into the orchard of the Empire. ‘This is an unbelievably good and fertile place,’ he told Catherine. The Prince was evidently an early Green: at least, he instinctively understood what is now called ecology. To plant a tree to him was to help build the future of his lands, so he frequently ordered his men to ‘plant paradise trees’ or ‘chestnuts’. On 5 August 1785, Potemkin printed an address to the nobles in the Crimea in which he autocratically required them to plant and create prosperity: ‘I consider tillage the first source of riches.’ It was a reliable business because the army always needed provisions and it was a service to the state. But if the land was not sown, ‘it shames its owner and reproaches him with laziness’.10

  He practised what he preached. ‘Wishing to promote the settling of Perekop steppe and set an example’, Potemkin himself took over forests and 6,000 desaytin ‘for picking of canes’.11 He continually ordered the directors of Crimean Agriculture, Professors Livanov and Prokopovich (who studied in England, along with students sent by Potemkin), and the botanist Hablitz, to travel the peninsula improving anything they could suggest. Apart from ordering Korsakov to build salt bridges to make the collection of salt more efficient, he sent engineers to seek bituminous coal along the Donetz and Lugansk rivers. The Taurida region even had a resident mining expert.12

  The Prince was obsessed with using his estates and those he gave to others as trading posts between south and north. ‘The boats that carry the supplies from the estates and factories of Prince Potemkin [from Belorussia] for the navy in Kherson are filled on their return with salt…’, a French diplomat explained to Paris. With his acquisition of the empty steppes of the Crimean Khanate and the Zaporogian Sech, Potemkin intended to use grants of land to encourage trade and manufacturing, especially among foreigners like the Benthams. In this too he favoured Anglo-Saxons. ‘The Russians are unfit for commerce,’ Potemkin later told a British envoy, ‘and he was always of the opinion that the foreign trade of the empire should be carried on entirely’ by Englishmen.13

  Potemkin ordered that no land should be given out without his command. There were many ways to settle these vast lands: first, he granted massive estates to magnates, officials (like his secretary Popov and his ally Bezborodko, who was delighted with his ‘almost royal’ estate), foreign friends (like the Prince de Ligne), Cossack cronies and renegade Tartars – and he gave himself 73,000 desyatins on the mainland, 13,000 on the peninsula.14 If landowners did well, Serenissimus lifted taxes on them, as he did for three students of English agriculture ‘for their great progresses’.15 If they wasted their gift, Potemkin was tempted to take it away from them. Many foreigners, from Genoese noblemen to English peeresses, bombarded the Prince with schemes and demands for land – but they got them only if they had an entrepreneurial plan.

  ‘I have, my Prince, a great desire to become a proprietor of some estates here,’ the seductive and pushy Countess of Craven wrote to him from the Crimea. This daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, with her curly Medusan head of hair, was already a favourite beauty of the London scandal-sheets, not unlike the Duchesses of Kingston and Devonshire, but this talented and independent woman was also a courageous traveller and an early best-selling travel-writer. After an exceedingly short marriage with the peer whose name she shamelessly used, she had been caught in flagrante with a French duke, an envoy to London, but she was also notoriously ‘democratic’ in her tastes, supposedly even having working-class lovers. Then she went travelling with a young lover while writing colourful letters to her suitor, the Margrave of Anspach, brother-in-law of Frederick the Great. These were later published as her Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople. She ended her geographical, amorous and literary voyage in 1791 by marrying the Margrave, with whom Potemkin was also in correspondence, thereby joining the ranks of imperial petty-royalty.16

  Elisabeth Craven met the Prince in Petersburg and travelled to the Crimea with his blessing. She saw the opportunities there. ‘I would make a colony of honest and industrious people of my country,’ she suggested. ‘I’d be very happy to see my own land flower…I tell you frankly, my Prince, I’d like to have two estates in different places of Taurida.’ She appealed to his well-known romanticism, calling this her ‘beautiful dream’. Her Ladyship suspiciously begged him ‘not to share this with [Harris’s successor as British envoy to Russia] Mr Fitzherbert nor my compatriots’, presumably because she did not wish it to reach the London newspapers. In case Potemkin was not sufficiently tempted by her offer, Her Ladyship ensured that he knew exactly who she was, signing each letter, ‘Elisabeth Craven, Peeress of England, née Lady Elisabeth Berkeley.’ Potemkin’s reply is unknown, but she never settled her family in the Crimea. Perhaps the Prince, who was no longer the neophyte charmed by Semple, thought this ‘Peeress of England’ protested too much.17

  The Prince dreamed of filling his lands with prospering plantations and industrious factories: this time he wanted not soldiers but experts on agriculture. Catherine quoted Potemkin to her German friend Dr Zimmerman: ‘In Taurida, the principal matter must…be the cultivation of the land and nurture of silkworms and consequently mulberry plantations. Cloth could be made here…cheese-making would also be very desirable…gardens, above all botanical gardens…we need sensible and knowledgeable people.’18

  When the Spanish officer Antonio d’Estandas requested land to found china factories not far from Simferopol, the Prince at once ordered his governor to provide ‘as much land as necessary’ but ‘with the obligation that the factory is established without delay’.19 He stressed agriculture, orchards and flocks of sheep instead of herds of cattle,20 believing the Crimea was ideal for wool and sheepbreeding. ‘Making wool better with simple and correct methods,’ he boasted to Catherine, ‘we’ll beat every country in Europe with our cloth. I ordered males from everywhere where they have the best sheep and I’m waiting for them next summer.’21

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  The Prince fostered various industries himself – particularly wine and silk. He behaved as a mixture of autocrat, banker, entrepreneur and customer. When he decided to manufacture silk, as he was already successfully doing in Astrakhan, he made an agreement with the Italian Count of Parma to produce it on a large estate. The Prince provided twenty families of peasants from his Russian estates, promising to add another twenty after five years, and lent the Count 4,000 roubles as seed money. To encourage the industry, he then bought all the silk produced locally at an inflated price.22 As for Potemkin’s success, Maria Guthrie found the ‘zealous’ Count still producing fine silk at the turn of the century.23

  The Prince wanted to make Ekaterinoslav the marketing centre for the silk from his Crimean mulberry plantations. A silk-stockings factory was built at a cost of 340,000 roubles and he soon sent the Empress a pair of stockings so fine that they could be preserved in the shell of a nut. ‘When, my Merciful Mother,’ the Prince wrote, ‘you visit the dominions over which I preside, you will see your path covered
with silk.’24

  As for wine, the Prince planted 30,000 vines of Tokay wine, imported from Hungary with Joseph’s permission, in four places across the peninsula. He had been planting orchards and vineyards for years in Astrakhan, whence he brought his French viticulturist Joseph Banq to Soudak, the lush Crimean seaside village, beneath a ruined Genoese fortress, which became his wine centre. It is a tribute to Potemkin’s activity that he had the gardener in place buying estates by September 1783, weeks after annexing the Khanate. Banq’s sorry letters, scattered among the Potemkin archives, are bad-tempered, poorly written and often stained, as if he was writing them while watering his vines. They demonstrate the difficulties of putting Potemkin’s schemes into reality. Poor Banq bitterly missed his wife – ‘without my family, I cannot stay at Soudak if His Highness offered me all the world’. In any case, the work was impossible without twenty workers – not soldiers! But the workers were rude to Banq and he had to complain to the Prince again. When the vines flourished, he proudly sent Serenissimus 150 bottles of his red Soudak wine.25

  Banq’s job was to expand the vineyards, to plant fruit orchards and raisin plantations and, as a profitable sideline, to ‘build a factory of vodka as in France’. His salary in this five-year mission was 2,000 roubles a year (much more than the average Russian officer’s) plus an apartment, firewood, a pair of horses and forty litre barrels of wine.26 On arrival, the Frenchman grumbled that the gardens bought for him were ‘not worth anything…it hasn’t been cultivated for three years…it’s a waste of time to make wine this year’.27 Finally Potemkin sacked the unfortunate, who may have been caught stealing, because he begged for forgiveness while feeling ‘the most horrible despair’. His fate is unknown, but another Frenchman replaced him.28 ‘The wine of Soudak’, declared the French envoy, Comte de Ségur, in a report to Versailles, ‘is very agreeable’ – Maria Guthrie concurred at the turn of the century.29

  Even in the middle of the Second Russo-Turkish War in 1789, as he advanced into Ottoman territory, the Prince found time to order Faleev ‘to plough the best fertile ground and prepare enough string beans for sowing next summer. I shall send you the seeds from Jassy. I am going to arrange a school of husbandry here…’.30 The planter and builder never rested and never ceased to enjoy creating.

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  Potemkin’s empire within an empire was not confined to New Russia: he also ran the military frontiers of the Caucasus and the Kuban, which were almost permanently at war throughout the 1780s as the Chechens and other mountain peoples resisted the Russian advance. The Russian solution was to maintain a line of forts across the Caucasus, manned by military outposts of hardy Cossack settlers. As soon as he came to power in the 1770s, Potemkin reconsidered the defence plans for the Caucasus. He decided to advance the border defences from the old Tsaritsyn Line to the new Azov–Mozdok Line.

  The Prince already thought beyond mere guns and towers. The Line, he wrote, ‘gives the opportunity to set up vineyards, silk and cotton plantations, to increase stock-breeding, stud-farms, orchards and grain production, joins Azov with Astrakhan Province, and in time of war…restrains their pressure on our lands’.31 The new Line was started in the summer of 1777 with the construction of a series of forts at Ekaterinograd, Georgievsk and Stavropol. The Kabardian, Cherkess and Nogai tribesmen rebelled and were suppressed. In 1780, Potemkin moved the first civilian settlers, often state peasants from the interior, into the towns that were to grow into major provincial centres.*2 When the fortifications were nearly complete in late 1782, the Empress decreed that Potemkin should have ‘sole supervision’ of assignment of land there.32 The Prince moved Cossacks up to the Line from their settlements on the Volga. When he created the fortress of Vladikafkaz in 1784, he gave it a name that threw down a gauntlet to the tribesmen of the hills: ‘Master of the Caucasus’.

  The Georgievsk Treaty of 1783 with King Hercules advanced the Russian borders, leap-frogging over the Caucasus to Tiflis. By this time, Potemkin’s projects and territories were so vast that he recommended to the Empress that she form a separate viceroyalty for the Caucasus, containing the Caucasus, Astrakhan and Saratov provinces – under his ultimate control of course. The Prince’s dynamic cousin Pavel Potemkin was appointed viceroy: after creating the Georgian Military Road over the mountains to Tiflis, he settled state and church peasants to people his new towns. In 1786 alone, 30,307 settlers were available from inside Russia for the Prince to assign to the Caucasus (and to Ekaterinoslav). Pavel Sergeievich was a true Potemkin: he raised Ekaterinograd to be his viceregal capital, holding court there in a splendid palace.33

  Russian advances into the Caucasus provoked an Islamic rebellion among the Chechens, Avars and other tribes: in 1785, a mysterious leader in a green cloak using the name Sheikh Mansour – ‘Victor’ – emerged from the mountains, preaching the ideals of the Nazshbandi brotherhood of mystical Sufism and declaring a Ghazavat – holy war – against the Russians. No one will ever know who he really was: he was probably a Chechen shepherd named Ushurma, born around 1748, but some said he was an Italian notary’s son from Monteferrat named Giovanni Battista Boetti, who ran away to become a Dominican missionary, converted to Islam, studied the Koran in the medressahs of Bokhara and ended as a Moslem warrior. Some Russians did not believe he existed at all: he was just a symbol wrapped in a green cloak.*3 He and his warriors, precursors of the Murids, who, under Shamyl defied Russia in the nineteenth century, managed to eliminate one column of 600 Russian troops, but he was defeated more frequently than he was victorious. Nevertheless, he led his coalition of mountain tribesmen with a daring flair that made him a legend.

  The war against Sheikh Mansour was directly run by Pavel Potemkin from Ekaterinograd. But Potemkin’s archives show that the Prince ultimately oversaw this perennial war, which kept the Caucasus and Kuban corps in constant action. Before the Russo-Turkish War broke out again in 1787, a defeated Mansour fled to raise the Cherkess in Ottoman territory. When the war began, he was ready to fight again.34 The Russians never permanently suppressed these guerrilla fighters, spending much of the next century fighting the so-called Murid Wars. At the time of writing, this war is still going on.

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  The Prince also built his own palaces across the south, fit for a viceroy if not a tsar. He had ‘the large house’ at Kremenchuk, visited by Lady Craven and Francisco de Miranda;35 a vast palace at Kherson*4 with two wings, each with two storeys and a central portico of four storeys, which was the centrepiece of the new city. Then there was the glory of his ‘Athens’, the monumental Ekaterinoslav*5 Palace, designed by Ivan Starov with two wings that extended 120 metres from the portico with six columns reached by two stone staircases: Potemkin’s gardener William Gould followed Starov with his hundreds of workers. In Ekaterinoslav, he built an English Garden and two hothouses around the Potemkin Palace to match all its ‘practicality and loveliness’, as the gardener told the Prince.36

  Oddly, Potemkin did not build for himself on a particularly grand scale in the Crimea, but Starov did build him a now vanished pink marble palace at Karasubazaar.37 His last palace was in Nikolaev.*6 Built when Potemkin was almost becoming an Ottoman sultan, he ordered a Moldavian–Turkish style from local architects – a dome with four towers, like a mosque. Its high, sunny but cool and breezy position above the meeting of the two rivers was scenic. Since it was on the banks of the Ingul river, it had two storeys at the front rising to a third – but one at the back. In his last months, the Prince ordered Starov to add a banya and fountain ‘like mine at Tsarskoe Selo’.38 It was Starov’s last work for his master.*7

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  The Prince himself always believed that the south was his life’s work. In his last days in Petersburg in June 1791, he subjected the British envoy William Fawkener, who never got a word in edgeways, to an exuberant soliloquy that showed he never lost his enthusiasm. Potemki
n displayed all the excitement, energy, imagination and arrogance that made him a great imperial statesman. He had to head to the south to continue his great projects, he said, ‘the success of all which depended solely on him…’. There was the fleet he had built almost with his own hands, and ‘the population of his Government has increased since his appointment from above 80,000 to above 400,000 fighting men and the whole might amount to nearly a million…’.39

  Before the lies had overpowered the truth, the French Ambassador, Ségur, who sent Versailles a report on Potemkin’s gargantuan achievements, enthused that ‘when he took possession of his immense viceroyalty, there were only 204,000 inhabitants and under his administration the population in merely three years had grown to 800,000. This growth is composed of Greek colonists, Germans, Poles, invalids, retired soldiers and sailors.’

  Potemkin increased the estimated population of the Crimea from 52,000 males in 1782 to 130,000 by 1795. In the rest of New Russia during the same period, the male population increased from 339,000 in the same period to 554,000, which meant that Potemkin almost managed to double the population of the Viceroyalty from 391,000 to 684,000 in just over a decade. Another reputable historian estimates that the male population rose from 724,678 in 1787 to 819,731 in 1793. Whatever the true figures, this was an awesome achievement. ‘Until the invention of steamships and railroads in the nineteenth century opened up…distant regions such as the American Middle West…to commercial farming, this Russian expansion’, writes a modern historian, ‘remained unparalleled in scale, scope and rapidity.’40

  He founded literally hundreds of settlements – ‘one Frenchman’, recorded Ségur, ‘told me every year he found new villages established and flourishing in places that had formerly been deserts’41 – and several big ones. Most still flourish today: Kherson, 355,000 inhabitants; Nikolaev, 1.2 million; Ekaterinoslav (now Dniepropetrovsk), 600,000; Sebastopol, 375,000; Simferopol, 358,000; Stravropol, 350,000; Vladikafkaz (capital of North Ossetia), 300,000; and Odessa, 1.1 million. Most still contain shipyards and naval bases.